Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[Torque]

...
Perhaps 2018 is bitcoin's 1994.

...By 1998 things had changed alot.  Win 95/98 IE/Netscape made it much more useful and simple to use the internet and sites began to proliferate.  I had dropped out to take a 35k job at a search engine optimization company (which seemed like alot at the time) that quickly went out of biz, but my connections from that job led to other connections that have kept me working for the 20 years since.

tldr; if it's 1994,  buckle up, things will be unrecognizable in 4 years.

What would be our Netscape moment? Or AOL temporary dominance?
Is Lightning a.k.a Netscape (without the IPO) and is Coinbase/Binance/Bitfinex, perhaps, the AOL equivalent?
Or, would it be something else out of left field?

At this point, I think Bitcoin's "internet" or "Netscape" moment won't have much to do with a bunch of tech advancements to either Bitcoin or 2nd layer solutions. Personally I think it's going to be Bitcoin ETFs that define the turning point.

When Wall Street and corporations start singing the praises of Bitcoin ETFs, hedge fund investors can begin to invest directly through those vehicles, and Mom and Pop suddenly find a Bitcoin ETF as part of their company's Mutual Fund 401k portfolio offerings... then look the fk out.

Money will come pouring in. And Average Joes on the street will suddenly start buying in as well.

And possibly something like Bitcoin being added as a payment option to EBay or Amazon. That would also be huge.

[suchmoon]

And it was major players like AOL what helped in its adoption... I am not sure Bitcoin already have its "AOL" or if we could consider Coinbase to be the equivalent.

Coinbase support (or lack thereof) is very much AOL-esque. As is their infuriating slowness at times. Adoption - not so much. They insist on using less favorable exchange rates AND charging much higher fees on Coinbase than on GDAX. Makes no sense. As if they're deliberately trying to piss users off.

It's a common business practice to raise prices (fees in this case) when you can't service all the demand. So it is somewhat fair what they are doing, presumably until they scale enough to (adequately) attend a bigger user base. AOL was also more expensive than what earlier Internet users had (ie: free for one reasons or another).

So yes... maybe coinbase is our AOL. Let's just hope they do things right and other competitors also rise.

So all we need now is a book store named after a river...

Edit:

Amazon

LOL

[marcus_of_augustus]

I've been meaning to ask, but what is the product series in your avatar?

The only things that come to mind are sine and cosine, but those are sums and have 2pi in their summands. So I thought it could be something along the lines of a log of a negative exponential due to the -1 factor that doesn't appear in the standard expression for the exponential series and the product could've been a result of a logarithm.

it is the series for a function I discovered that has some useful and interesting properties. PM me if you want to know any more.

[BTCMILLIONAIRE]

I've been meaning to ask, but what is the product series in your avatar?

The only things that come to mind are sine and cosine, but those are sums and have 2pi in their summands. So I thought it could be something along the lines of a log of a negative exponential due to the -1 factor that doesn't appear in the standard expression for the exponential series and the product could've been a result of a logarithm.

it is the series for a function I discovered that has some useful and interesting properties. PM me if you want to know any more.

PM sent.

[Wekkel]

So, we need to get Bitcoin on a CD ROM to get this going

[Toxic2040]

...
Perhaps 2018 is bitcoin's 1994.

...By 1998 things had changed alot.  Win 95/98 IE/Netscape made it much more useful and simple to use the internet and sites began to proliferate.  I had dropped out to take a 35k job at a search engine optimization company (which seemed like alot at the time) that quickly went out of biz, but my connections from that job led to other connections that have kept me working for the 20 years since.

tldr; if it's 1994,  buckle up, things will be unrecognizable in 4 years.

What would be our Netscape moment? Or AOL temporary dominance?
Is Lightning a.k.a Netscape (without the IPO) and is Coinbase/Binance/Bitfinex, perhaps, the AOL equivalent?
Or, would it be something else out of left field?

If I would guess, this. There is this accelerated curve(parabolic) of technology and innovation that has occured over the last 50 years. This snowball effect will continue until the Singularity.

I can remember clearly the first time I shilled the internet. It was at my friends printing shop..you know..the kind with a actual 3 color offset press...not a photocopier...anyway. I was helping him set up a basic db for hes revolving accounts on DOS 3.something and telling him the benefits he would receive if he would just upgrade from a 14.4k to a 28.8k modem.    

[elg]

So, we need to get Bitcoin on a CD ROM to get this going

jajaja
on windows 3.1

[BTCMILLIONAIRE]

...
Perhaps 2018 is bitcoin's 1994.

...By 1998 things had changed alot.  Win 95/98 IE/Netscape made it much more useful and simple to use the internet and sites began to proliferate.  I had dropped out to take a 35k job at a search engine optimization company (which seemed like alot at the time) that quickly went out of biz, but my connections from that job led to other connections that have kept me working for the 20 years since.

tldr; if it's 1994,  buckle up, things will be unrecognizable in 4 years.

What would be our Netscape moment? Or AOL temporary dominance?
Is Lightning a.k.a Netscape (without the IPO) and is Coinbase/Binance/Bitfinex, perhaps, the AOL equivalent?
Or, would it be something else out of left field?

If I would guess, this. There is this accelerated curve(parabolic) of technology and innovation that has occured over the last 50 years. This snowball effect will continue until the Singularity.

I can remember clearly the first time I shilled the internet. It was at my friends printing shop..you know..the kind with a actual 3 color offset press...not a photocopier...anyway. I was helping him set up a basic db for hes revolving accounts on DOS 3.something and telling him the benefits he would receive if he would just upgrade from a 14.4k to a 28.8k modem.    

I don't see a singularity putting a stop to the snowball effect. It's "just" an event comparable to going from apes to humans, but there'll be new problems that will take decades and centuries to solve.

A singularity doesn't just imply an explosion of productivity and capacity, or I guess you could state it that way. But that would also entail the capacity to produce problems that are far beyond the reach of a society that is well into the singularity.

If we think of teleportation or FTL travel we can't even really begin to fathom how to construct a practical solution. And while those problems may or may not become trivial with a singularity event, there'd surely be problems of similar status for a post-singularity society.

[JayJuanGee]

We have (barely) broken the downward channel which has dominated since $17k.   Even if the pump doesn’t hold, the channel is now vulnerable.  It could be the end of the bear market.

I have a hard time thinking of this pullback from a monster pump as anything close to a bear market.

Most would consider a 70% retracement from ATH as a crash.  Even in Bitcoin.  I am not wordy man so I will leave it at that.

I'm not wordy man, either (NOT)... yet I have to agree with the picnic bear on this not a bear market assessment.  

A less than 2 month price correction does not rise to the level of a bear market, but if we are still bouncing down to the $7k territory in 6 months, both the picnic bear and I may have to reconsider our assessment based on those new facts (that have not yet played out, as I type...    ) , and perhaps jbreher and I would conclude differently depending on what happens in these upcoming 6 months in the event that we are still bouncing down to $7k during that time.

On the other hand, if we bounce around in the range of $7k to $20k in the next 6 months, then that would not necessarily be bearish, but if we are having difficulties getting above $10k or maintaining prices above $10k in the next 6 months or so, and we still keep retesting the $7ks, then perhaps under those kinds of facts (that have not played out yet) we might be within the range of bear market considerations.

In other words, currently, our facts of BTC price performance between August 2017 and even just focusing on December 2017 until now seem quite far from a bear market definition based on a mere less than 2 months of this current correction and a seeming rebound from the bottom of that correction... We gotta look at the context, hello, and that context is broader than merely the past less than 2 months..

[julian071]

So, we need to get Bitcoin on a CD ROM to get this going

Bitcoin should copy Paypal like Byteball already did.

Here is your link to receive 2000,000 bytes (≈1.42 USD): https://byteball.org/openapp.html#textcoin?solve-market-economy-wheat-fee-alien-helmet-mistake-push-elite-dial-expose

[infofront]

...
Perhaps 2018 is bitcoin's 1994.

...By 1998 things had changed alot.  Win 95/98 IE/Netscape made it much more useful and simple to use the internet and sites began to proliferate.  I had dropped out to take a 35k job at a search engine optimization company (which seemed like alot at the time) that quickly went out of biz, but my connections from that job led to other connections that have kept me working for the 20 years since.

tldr; if it's 1994,  buckle up, things will be unrecognizable in 4 years.

What would be our Netscape moment? Or AOL temporary dominance?
Is Lightning a.k.a Netscape (without the IPO) and is Coinbase/Binance/Bitfinex, perhaps, the AOL equivalent?
Or, would it be something else out of left field?

As Andreas Antonopoulos likes to say, bitcoin is the internet of money. Currency is just the first app on the bitcoin blockchain.

That's our killer app (for now). Lightning network will refine this and give us such innovations as "streaming money". So, perhaps an easy to use, LN based payments solution that changes the way we think about money will be our Netscape moment.

The Death of AOL will come when people realize bitcoin is more than just currency.  Just as people realized the internet was more than their AOL walled garden. For example, the BTC blockchain could replace 25% of our jobs within 5 years.  IRS/tax authority fuckers, accountants, many attorneys, the secretary of state/DMV, registers of deeds, bankers, accounts payable/receivable people - Bitcoin will replace them all and then some.

[bitserve]

So, we need to get Bitcoin on a CD ROM to get this going

Bitcoin should copy Paypal like Byteball already did.

Here is your link to receive 2000,000 bytes (≈1.42 USD): https://byteball.org/openapp.html#textcoin?solve-market-economy-wheat-fee-alien-helmet-mistake-push-elite-dial-expose

Yes. That is a very simple but extremely useful feature of Byteball.

I envision when we have a similar one over LN.

[julian071]

...
Perhaps 2018 is bitcoin's 1994.

...By 1998 things had changed alot.  Win 95/98 IE/Netscape made it much more useful and simple to use the internet and sites began to proliferate.  I had dropped out to take a 35k job at a search engine optimization company (which seemed like alot at the time) that quickly went out of biz, but my connections from that job led to other connections that have kept me working for the 20 years since.

tldr; if it's 1994,  buckle up, things will be unrecognizable in 4 years.

What would be our Netscape moment? Or AOL temporary dominance?
Is Lightning a.k.a Netscape (without the IPO) and is Coinbase/Binance/Bitfinex, perhaps, the AOL equivalent?
Or, would it be something else out of left field?

As Andreas Antonopoulos like to say, bitcoin is the internet of money. Currency is just the first app on the bitcoin blockchain.

That's our killer app (for now). Lightning network will refine this and give us such innovations as "streaming money". So, perhaps a LN based payments solution that changes the way we think about money will be our Netscape moment.

The Death of AOL will come when people realize bitcoin is more than just currency.  Just as people realized the internet was more than their AOL walled garden. The BTC blockchain could replace 25% of our jobs within 5 years.  IRS/tax authority fuckers, accountants, many attorneys, the secretary of state/DMV, registers of deeds, bankers, accounts payable/receivable people. Bitcoin will replace them all and then some.

Exactly. So many useful purposes, where thing can run so much more effeciently. For example here in NL, the city of Utrecht and the central government are experimenting with storing your identy on a blockchain, so you can easily prove who you are without sending a copy of your personal information (in NL it's a BSN, in the US that would be your social security number) or a copy of your ID. That would seriously reduce the risk of identity fraud. Another municipality is experimenting with transactions for people on wellfare using an app based on a blockchain. So much less administration and forms, people can just go to a store and get e.g. clothing for their children paying with an app.

Edit: again, a great story about crypto's place in history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX3M8Ka9vUA

[JayJuanGee]

In terms of awareness it is probably 1998 but adoption wise it is probably around 1995 with just the university kids on the Net. Cool colleagues have just started trading crypto but the rest is still ignoring it. Some probably will the rest of their lives 

It makes sense. Almost everybody has already heard of Bitcoin the same as Internet in 95-97. But way less than 1% got/use, so it is 93-95 in that.

Also in terms of development it is like when we only had telnet, ftp, email and irc (I always considered gopher useless).... and everything was command line/shell only.

It was the development of HTPP what transformed it into something "ready" for mainstream people.

I think we still lack that "http" of Bitcoin... but LN is surely a step in the right direction.

And it was major players like AOL what helped in its adoption... I am not sure Bitcoin already have its "AOL" or if we could consider Coinbase to be the equivalent.

I thought that bitcoin is the HTTP.. and everything get's built upon bitcoin.. no?

[bitserve]

In terms of awareness it is probably 1998 but adoption wise it is probably around 1995 with just the university kids on the Net. Cool colleagues have just started trading crypto but the rest is still ignoring it. Some probably will the rest of their lives  

It makes sense. Almost everybody has already heard of Bitcoin the same as Internet in 95-97. But way less than 1% got/use, so it is 93-95 in that.

Also in terms of development it is like when we only had telnet, ftp, email and irc (I always considered gopher useless).... and everything was command line/shell only.

It was the development of HTPP what transformed it into something "ready" for mainstream people.

I think we still lack that "http" of Bitcoin... but LN is surely a step in the right direction.

And it was major players like AOL what helped in its adoption... I am not sure Bitcoin already have its "AOL" or if we could consider Coinbase to be the equivalent.

I thought that bitcoin is the HTTP.. and everything get's built upon bitcoin.. no?

No. HTTP is a higher layer (lower than HTML though). Bitcoin/Blockchain is more like TCP/IP (it's just an analogy).

Higher layers are the next step towards user ergonomy. We need more of those in which blockchain would be just an underlaying transparent lower level layer.... and "Bitcoin" will be *ALL* that.

Maybe even some additional layers in which BTC is converted to "stable" DIGITAL fiat via sidechain atomic swaps.

[JayJuanGee]

...
Perhaps 2018 is bitcoin's 1994.

...By 1998 things had changed alot.  Win 95/98 IE/Netscape made it much more useful and simple to use the internet and sites began to proliferate.  I had dropped out to take a 35k job at a search engine optimization company (which seemed like alot at the time) that quickly went out of biz, but my connections from that job led to other connections that have kept me working for the 20 years since.

tldr; if it's 1994,  buckle up, things will be unrecognizable in 4 years.

What would be our Netscape moment? Or AOL temporary dominance?
Is Lightning a.k.a Netscape (without the IPO) and is Coinbase/Binance/Bitfinex, perhaps, the AOL equivalent?
Or, would it be something else out of left field?

As Andreas Antonopoulos likes to say, bitcoin is the internet of money. Currency is just the first app on the bitcoin blockchain.

That's our killer app (for now). Lightning network will refine this and give us such innovations as "streaming money". So, perhaps an easy to use, LN based payments solution that changes the way we think about money will be our Netscape moment.

The Death of AOL will come when people realize bitcoin is more than just currency.  Just as people realized the internet was more than their AOL walled garden. For example, the BTC blockchain could replace 25% of our jobs within 5 years.  IRS/tax authority fuckers, accountants, many attorneys, the secretary of state/DMV, registers of deeds, bankers, accounts payable/receivable people - Bitcoin will replace them all and then some.

Since you bring up Andreas.  Here's a decent question answer video from him from today attempting to clarify some of the misconceptions about lightning network.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4TjfaLgzj4

[marcus_of_augustus]

... next phase would be an equivalent to when CISCO boomed by providing hardware boxes that perform bitcoin and lightning routing plug 'n play for secure network backbone roll-out and then after that we get into (ISPs) phase ... i.e. Lightning Network Providers (LNPs) will be the new AT&T, Verizon, etc

...if you subscribe to the analogy. Coinbase is becoming the joke toy internet dinosaur AOL turned out to be ... amazons and googles have yet to be sighted, imho. keep your powder dry.

[mymenace]

In terms of awareness it is probably 1998 but adoption wise it is probably around 1995 with just the university kids on the Net. Cool colleagues have just started trading crypto but the rest is still ignoring it. Some probably will the rest of their lives  

It makes sense. Almost everybody has already heard of Bitcoin the same as Internet in 95-97. But way less than 1% got/use, so it is 93-95 in that.

Also in terms of development it is like when we only had telnet, ftp, email and irc (I always considered gopher useless).... and everything was command line/shell only.

It was the development of HTPP what transformed it into something "ready" for mainstream people.

I think we still lack that "http" of Bitcoin... but LN is surely a step in the right direction.

And it was major players like AOL what helped in its adoption... I am not sure Bitcoin already have its "AOL" or if we could consider Coinbase to be the equivalent.

I thought that bitcoin is the HTTP.. and everything get's built upon bitcoin.. no?

No. HTTP is a higher layer (lower than HTML though). Bitcoin/Blockchain is more like TCP/IP (it's just an analogy).

Higher layers are the next step towards user ergonomy. We need more of those in which blockchain would be just an underlaying transparent lower level layer.... and "Bitcoin" will be *ALL* that.

Maybe even some additional layers in which BTC is converted to "stable" DIGITAL fiat via sidechain atomic swaps.

yeah i like that

IP = Blockchain

replace the IP addresses with encrypted blockchain addresses

decentralize the ip layer - web 3.0 is here

[JayJuanGee]

In terms of awareness it is probably 1998 but adoption wise it is probably around 1995 with just the university kids on the Net. Cool colleagues have just started trading crypto but the rest is still ignoring it. Some probably will the rest of their lives  

It makes sense. Almost everybody has already heard of Bitcoin the same as Internet in 95-97. But way less than 1% got/use, so it is 93-95 in that.

Also in terms of development it is like when we only had telnet, ftp, email and irc (I always considered gopher useless).... and everything was command line/shell only.

It was the development of HTPP what transformed it into something "ready" for mainstream people.

I think we still lack that "http" of Bitcoin... but LN is surely a step in the right direction.

And it was major players like AOL what helped in its adoption... I am not sure Bitcoin already have its "AOL" or if we could consider Coinbase to be the equivalent.

I thought that bitcoin is the HTTP.. and everything get's built upon bitcoin.. no?

No. HTTP is a higher layer (lower than HTML though). Bitcoin/Blockchain is more like TCP/IP (it's just an analogy).

Higher layers are the next step towards user ergonomy. We need more of those in which blockchain would be just an underlaying transparent lower level layer.... and "Bitcoin" will be *ALL* that.

Maybe even some additional layers in which BTC is converted to "stable" DIGITAL fiat via sidechain atomic swaps.

O.k....   Your earlier point makes more sense, now.  Thanks for the ELI5 clarification, which is good for me, and may help out some others too with these ongoing assertions of fitting analogies.

[bitebits]

Bitcoin bears are betting against a known limited supply of bitcoin. Bitcoin bulls are betting against an unknown unlimited supply of fiat.

/thread (for today)